1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and apparatus for teaching students to read by matching each of the forty-four spoken sounds listed in standard English dictionaries to the letter or letters in the regular twenty-six letter English alphabet which most often spell each sound and more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to thirty-three sound letters formed in the shape and general appearance of regular English alphabet letter or English alphabet letters, thirty-one of the thirty-three sound letters symbolizing phonetically pure and distinctive sounds and two sound letters symbolizing a voiced and unvoiced combination of two of the phonetically pure and distinctive sounds symbolized by the thirty-one sound letters so that students can first learn many words formed from alphabetic letters symbolizing just one phonetically pure and distinctive sound.
2. Discussion
It is well known that the level of American educational performance has declined during the last thirty years. Over one hundred million scores on academic, college, and military entrance tests taken since the College Board started giving Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT's) in 1926 and the United States Department of Defense started giving Army General Classification Tests (AGCT's) in 1940 prove, however, that the level of American educational performance has been sinking for sixty years--almost twice as long as most people think.
Before 1929-30, virtually all normal American children learned to read during their first year in school. In common parlance, students learned "phonics". Teachers taught children to read by matching sounds used to form spoken words to letters most often used to spell the sounds. Students learned to write words they heard by substituting letters for sounds and to read words they saw by substituting sounds for letters--even in words students had never seen before. Even dyslexic students and students with poor sight memories learned to read using phonics.
"See and say" reading instruction (also referred to by educators as whole word recognition or sight repetition of whole words) was introduced in the late Twenties. Students learned to read by seeing words printed and reprinted, flashed and re-flashed over and over again. Technicians with instruments for tracking eye movements delivered additional support for whole word recognition proponents. Laboratory records showed that fast-reading adults gobble whole words, whole phrases, sentences, and even whole paragraphs at a glance. Fast adult readers did not pause for "sounding out" letters or syllables. Whole words, the technicians said, are the smallest units good readers recognize.
Educational decision makers of the late Twenties were convinced. Sight repetition of whole words would produce better, faster readers. Further, sight repetition was easier and more fun than phonics, so the students would enjoy learning.
Many big city school districts dropped phonics instruction in the late Twenties and early Thirties and adopted the radically new see and say teaching method. After the introduction of see and say instruction, SAT verbal scores and fourth-grade illiteracy among armed forces recruits (inability to read fourth-grade lessons, the armed forces' line of demarcation between literate recruits and illiterate recruits) declined simultaneously. Between 1941 and 1952, the SAT verbal score average fell twenty-four points--from 500 to 476. Between 1940 and 1953, fourth-grade illiteracy among twenty million armed forces registrants with at least four years of schooling jumped from a negligible 0.4 percent in the World War II draft (1940 to 1945) to seventeen percent in the Korean War draft (1950 to 1953). During the Vietnam War draft (1965 to 1973), fourth-grade illiteracy among armed forces registrants attending at least four years of school jumped to twenty-five percent.
Among World War II recruits having at least four years of schooling, almost all recruits received phonics instruction and almost all were literate. Among Korean War recruits having at least four years of schooling, from one-third to one-half of the recruits received see and say instruction and seventeen percent were rejected as fourth-grade illiterates. Among Vietnam War recruits having at least four years of schooling, over ninety percent received see and say instruction, and about twenty-five percent could not read at the 1940's fourth-grade proficiency level.
During the period from 1964 to 1973, the average SAT verbal score fell over thirty points to 445. Since 1973, the average SAT verbal score dropped to a 1980 low of 424, rose to a post-1962 high of 431 in 1985, then sank to an all-time low of 422 in 1991. The average SAT verbal score in 1992 was a near-low 423.
The number of American adults who cannot read is disturbing, but the increase in the number of American adults who cannot read is more disturbing. In 1930, 1940, and 1950 about 3,000,000 citizens--most of them residents over age fifty who had never been to school--could not read. President Lyndon Johnson said five million--most of them young adults with six to twelve years of schooling--could not read in the early Sixties. In 1970, twelve to seventeen million young adults with at least eight years of school attendance were illiterate. By 1980, the number of non-reading young adults had ballooned to almost thirty million.
In 1990, data from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Justice, Labor, Commerce, and the Census, together with twenty years of scores on U.S. Department of Education tests administered to fourth-grade, eighth-grade, and eleventh-grade students by the National Assessment of Education Progress, indicated thirty-five to forty million Americans could not use a phone book or read road signs, maps, menus, election ballots, can labels, car manuals, nursery rhymes, newspapers, The Bible, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States, or directions on a bottle of medicine.
Over ninety-nine percent of public two-year colleges in the United States have remedial reading classes. In the State of Oklahoma, eighty-one percent of students graduating from high school and entering Vocational-Technical (Vo-Tech) schools must first learn to read prior to learning technological skills. About eleven million public school students (one in four) in all grades are doing primary grade school lessons in very small, very expensive, Chapter 1 remedial classes or Special Education classes for the disadvantaged and disabled--although nine of ten enrolled in remedial or Special Education compensatory programs have normal sight, hearing, and intelligence with no diagnosed physical or mental handicaps.
American teachers, parents, and governmental agencies do not realize the catastrophic decline in literacy started during the Thirties rather than during the Sixties. The only event correlating to a decline in literacy beginning sixty years ago is the switch from phonics instruction to whole word recognition instruction.
Professional educators wanted whole word recognition instruction to succeed because phonics instruction presents difficulties. Whole word recognition instructors complain that phonics is difficult to teach because many sounds in the English language are spelled inconsistently. Only thirteen percent of English words do not follow phonetic spelling rules, however, and most of the thirteen percent contain only one maverick syllable spelled in a strange way. Designers of voice recognition computers say eighty-seven percent of English words follow phonetic spelling rules. Beginners can easily learn fifty to sixty common exceptions to phonetic spelling if the beginners first learn 1,000 words which follow the rules.
Too many years of trying and failing to make sight repetition instruction succeed has taken a terrible toll. In three years, students with good sight memories learn to recognize 1200 to 2000 most-used words by the words' shapes. The students learn the 1200 to 2000 most-used words from teachers who say the words over and over again and with readers which use each new word fifteen to twenty times in programmed stories.
But a vocabulary of 1200 to 2000 words is not enough for a third-grade student. In grades 4 through 8, third-grade see and say readers must add at least 20,000 new words to their reading vocabularies in order to read high school textbooks. Teaching 20,000 new words in five school years by see and say instruction is an impossible task. Ironically, one or two unfamiliar words can make nonsense out of paragraphs filled with words that third-grade see and say readers spent three years learning. In contrast, second grade phonics readers can sound out almost any word in a high school textbook. The second grade phonics reader may need definitions for words not in the reader's speaking vocabulary; and the phonics reader may need explanations for comparisons and references. But the phonics reader can read the words.
Sir James Pitman developed an Initial Teaching Alphabet (I.T.A.) in the Sixties to teach children to read by matching sounds with sight. Strictly a teaching tool, the I.T.A. sought to overcome a disparity between sounds children know in their heads and symbols children see on a printed page. The children confront a code, Pitman said, wherein the code is the English language. Over 40 distinct sound units of English are spelled in a variety of ways, and letters appearing in a variety of forms--capital, lower-case, printed, and handwritten--can be baffling.
I.T.A. proponents believed the baffling code of the English language sabotages conventional methods of teaching reading. The "look-say" method (as it was described in Time Magazine) tries to link a visual pattern of a word with the word's meaning, only to run up against confusing variations of form (all three letters of "AND" look different from those of "and," for example).
Also difficult is trying to apply the phonic method, which teaches children to single out letters and their phonemic values so that they can read and spell analytically. In the 26-letter alphabet, one letter often represents different sounds in differing words--for example, the o in gone, one, go, do, women. One sound may also be spelled in different ways--for example, the sound common to I and eye has 22 different spellings in words from aisle to buy to style. Time 83:52 (Apr. 3, 1964).
The I.T.A. erased inconsistencies by linking specific sounds to specific symbols. An all-lower-case alphabet included 44 characters--24 of 26 existing Roman letters (no q or x), plus 20 new letters consisting mostly of typographically linked digraphs. Each of the 44 I.T.A. symbols represents only one sound, and beginning readers can be confident the word seen in print is what the reader says in sound.
The I.T.A. delivered consistency and offered great promise. The Ford Foundation funded an experiment at Lehigh University's reading and study clinic to teach 3,000 children in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, and California by the new I.T.A. Dr. Albert Mazurkiewicz, director of the Lehigh clinic, predicted nearly all U.S. schools would adopt the new I.T.A. system in time. About 2,500 observers visited Lehigh to learn about the I.T.A. in 1964.
Despite its consistency, the I.T.A. also has problems. Students having good sight memories learn a phonetically correct but alphabetically incorrect spelling. After an initial flurry of activity and interest, the I.T.A. was not adopted by U.S. schools and is all but forgotten. The United States is left with almost thirty million illiterate adults.